Now that the Washington Post has decided the target of the Russian cyber attack (the Democratic Party) was actually to blame for what happened (are rape victims and robbery victims and fraud victims basically to blame?), does that mean open societies are doomed?

Do we need to cross that line to defend ourselves? Do we need to start arming schoolchildren to prevent the next mass shooting? Do we need to descend to their level to beat the undemocratic and malevolent forces? Do we need to validate the rightwing's accusations in order to defeat them? To defeat lies to we need to lie more and better? There is a Churchillian question in this: “Is this what we are fighting for?”

There must be some available jujitsu devices we should be developing and using. We have the most creative technical minds on the planet. Why aren’t they engaged on the side of liberal democracy?

Is it because there is a basic autocratic strain that defines Silicon Valley? Are they basically more interested in their opportunities to control us than enabling us to empower ourselves? (Do they believe fascism will set them free? Corporations are favored under fascism. They are constrained under democracy. Maybe they are tired of that.)

Have we gone back to the medieval belief system the Enlightenment and our own Revolution overturned?

Does the recent [victory] of Trumpism and Putinism prove that Might makes Right?

Does it prove that possession is 9/10 of the law? That the man with the gun wins the argument? That Power = Truth? Is that God’s Will? Are we to understand that God and Putin agree in principle?

Friday, June 23, 2017

How Trump Makes Us More Like Russia (Poor Us)

Why are we focused on Russia? "Trump won, shut up." "Why does it matter if Russians helped him?” It matters because Trump’s financial and business history is deeply entangled with Russian criminality, and the criminals who have helped him preserve an appearance of wealth for three decades will demand something in return. Like anyone who gets in bed with mobsters, Trump is being forced to pay them back (to borrow his word) “hugely." He may be paying them with our money, or he may be paying them back by dismantling America's global superiority, enabling Russia to fill that vacuum. Or he may be paying them back by grafting the kleptocratic Russian model onto our economy. Putin the kleptocrat has plenty of admirers here, rich people who see our economy as something to be looted rather than run properly and fairly. Investigators are following the money.

"The Post noted that the investigation also includes "suspicious financial activity" involving "Russian operatives." The New York Times was more specific in its account, saying that Mueller is looking at whether Trump associates laundered financial payoffs from Russian officials by channeling them through offshore accounts."

Trump promises everything, but how much does he deliver? Ask the people who enrolled their futures in Trump University. Now he's taken that con game to new heights via the White House, where his promises affect Americans' trust in their democratic system and institutions. Money Magazine reports on the Trump jobs promises that were hollow.

"Since his election, Trump has frequently used broad claims to take credit for jobs, especially those for blue collar workers, that the numbers don't bear out."

The massive advantages of people at the top of the economy used to be tempered somewhat by our democratic traditions and norms. But what if those norms and regulations were removed? What if the whole point of the economy was to enrich the very rich and bugger the rest of us? What if working people were the only ones paying for the roads and the bridges and the systems that keep our economy running, leaving the 1% off the hook? The money managers for the rich do a very good job of helping their clients avoid obligations the rest of us have to shoulder. Like those Russian oligarchs who operate as global free agents with no obligations and no restrictions.

"﻿ Part of the inequality problem, however, is that trillions of dollars are being shifted off the ledger, hidden from measurement and taxation. Some of this “hidden wealth of nations,” as Gabriel Zucman calls it, is kept in offshore tax havens like the Cayman Islands and Panama that function as secrecy jurisdictions with minimal transparency or reporting requirements. Trillions more has been hidden in trusts and other complex financial arrangements available only to the very wealthy. New research suggests that households in the top 0.01 percent, those with wealth over $40 million, evade 25 to 30 percent of person income and wealth taxes—about 10 times more than the general population.

"This process is aided and abetted by professional wealth managers who facilitate and lubricate the process of hiding wealth. Many of them work in private family offices that serve wealthy families. These are not mom-and-pop financial planners who help protect families from running out of money. We’re talking about the well-compensated professionals that serve the richest one-tenth of one percent of Americans."

But getting back to Trump and Russia––who has been floating Trump while he runs his grift on Americans? Fortune magazine reports.

"Trump said in the deposition that Bayrock’s Tevfik Arif “brought the people up from Moscow to meet with me,” and that he was teaming with Bayrock on other planned ventures in Moscow. The only Russians who likely had the resources and political connections to sponsor such ambitious international deals were the corrupt “oligarchs.” Although Trump claimed that negative publicity about him from O’Brien killed the deals, he still insisted that “we are actually going to be [in Russia] fairly soon.” When asked if he had “concerns about investing in Russia,” Trump answered “No.”

“...The plaintiffs in a 2015 racketeering case against Bayrock, Sater, and Arif, among others, alleged in the civil lawsuit that: “for most of its existence it [Bayrock] was substantially and covertly mob-owned and operated,” engaging “in a pattern of continuous, related crimes, including mail, wire, and bank fraud; tax evasion; money laundering; conspiracy; bribery; extortion; and embezzlement.” Although the lawsuit does not allege complicity by Trump, it claims that Bayrock exploited its joint ventures with Trump as a conduit for laundering money and evading taxes. The lawsuit cites as a “Concrete example of their crime, Trump SoHo, [which] stands 454 feet tall at Spring and Varick, where it also stands monument to spectacularly corrupt money-laundering and tax evasion.””

How has Trump gotten away with this? It's complicated and complication makes criminals harder to jail. Complex schemes are likelier to keep the money they've stolen. Look at how the financiers who collapsed our economy evaded jail. Trump's genius is in deception and evasion and big talk. He took the schtick on TV and got big ratings. We loved Trump like we loved Tony Soprano, because he wasn't hurting us personally... so we thought. Enough Americans loved that and bought it to make him a viable candidate in the Republican Party where that kind of scheme is accepted and admired. Where successful criminals are Winners and victims are Losers. Millions of Americans love throwing their money away at casinos and investing in bogus schemes and this scheme was bogus and entertaining. It's not new. What's new is the elevation of flim-flam and racketeering into the White House. If he hasn't yet fully criminalized the White House he has left enough of a criminal trail for investigators to follow. Trump fired Comey and Preet Bharara for investigating him. Will he fire Mueller? Can he? Will we let him? Maybe the Republican Congress will give him time to finish the job.

"Donald Trump has long deployed what might be called the chaff approach to evading legal scrutiny in his business dealings. Parts of his labyrinthine business holdings seem to be likely targets of investigation. He was sued for civil fraud over promises made to students of Trump University (a case that was settled after Trump became President). He talked on CNBC about the need to pay bribes when doing business overseas. His Atlantic City casino, the Taj Mahal, was in violation of anti-money-laundering laws when Trump owned it. He has had ties to New York Mafia figures. Yet he has never been indicted nor, for all we know, did any prosecutor consider pursuing a criminal case. Perhaps this is because the structure of Trump’s business has been, like chaff tossed out of a bomber, a remarkably effective defense. There is no one thing to look at when investigating Donald Trump. There’s not one company, there are hundreds, possibly thousands. Every deal he does has its own legal structure, its unique set of participants and business model. Rarely—and less often in the past decade—is Trump the primary owner and visionary of a project. More typically, he has sold a license to put his name on someone else’s project.”

What we are witnessing is a massive criminal takeover of our country, including the public sector––the government––and the economy. While they make us look over there (sparkly object: tweets, empty promises, rallies, boasts, showbiz) they quietly pick our pockets. The GOP Congress is fully engaged: promising Bigger and Better and Cheaper while quietly removing healthcare benefits and guarantees for pre-existing conditions and removing the systems that keep the poor covered and regulations that protect average people from being preyed upon and poisoned and impoverished. And they are doing this to deliver trillions in tax cuts to the top 1%. They are looting America the way Putin has looted Russia.

Russian mobsters have been looting the Russian economy since the 1990s when Putin took over. The ones doing it are licensed to loot by Putin himself, who gets a cut of everything. The looted trillions need a place to hide and some of that cash has been hidden in and laundered through Donald Trump’s many failing and dicy enterprises. Because nobody else would finance Trump. The banks refused. When the banks won’t help you, you turn to the Mob. Trump appears to be fully mobbed up.

But the larger pattern is more disturbing: the entire Republican financial scheme, including the healthcare “reform” and tax “reform” and deregulation and reinventing government itself, all seem to be modeled on the old scenario of mobsters taking over your business and looting it. Where is there money? Find it, take it, leave the system that money was operating in as a dysfunctional shell. They are operating on our national economy the way diners work on crab legs at Red Lobster: cracking the shell and sucking out the meat. What’s left is garbage.

Trump and his Republican friends in Congress are hollowing America out, using the Russian model. Like rodents looking for food supplies or missiles seeking targets, they are finding all the pockets of money being used to keep the system running and putting it into the pockets of their richest friends. Because they and their rich friends don’t need that system, they are rich, they are neatly invested offshore. They, like Putin and any of his Russian mobster/international gangster friends, don’t need America except as a source of loot. The America they do need is one with a pliant, obedient, cheap and desperate workforce, eager to mow their vast lawns and do their laundry and clean their homes and wait silently at table. To do the work and expect very little. Who cares if they die younger? Let them die the moment they can’t do the work. The way they do in Russia.

Tuesday, June 06, 2017

Why We Need To Make the Hitler Comparisons and repeal Godwin's Law

"[Ian] Kershaw combined two ideas that underpin his approach to Nazi history. First, the sociologist Max Weber's notion of charismatic leadership – the cult of personality which grew up around Hitler, the belief that he was imbued with almost superhuman powers and should never be questioned. And second, the phrase most associated with Kershaw: "working towards the Führer", the idea that though Hitler was not dictating every aspect of policy the entire bureaucratic apparatus devoted itself to trying to interpret his wishes. "People second-guessed what he wanted," Kershaw explains. "He didn't need to command everything. People interpret 'getting rid of the Jews' in different ways, and cumulatively that then pushes along the dynamic of the persecution without Hitler having to say 'do this, do that, do the other’.””

“…There is growing concern in the White House about what skeletons may emerge as investigators comb through a coterie of aides, past and present, who would have done virtually anything to win favor with Trump,” or they’re preparing to mount a defense of all those contacts between Trump’s inner circle and the Russians based on the inexperience, or stupidity, as one anonymous source put it, of “the motley, freewheeling crew of lieutenants and loyalists who have long populated his entourage.”

The vagueness and contradictoriness of Trump’s ideation combined with the ruthlessness and eager inhumanity of his henchmen make the Hitler comparison increasingly necessary.

Godwin’s Law is more a theory of how things happen than a ban or a prohibition against invoking Hitler. We should not ban the Hitler comparison for one obvious reason: Hitler was himself not “Hitler” until he was able to be, until he was licensed to be by election and empowered to be by the Enabling Act of 1933 and until he was further empowered and weaponized by the devotion of his thousands of henchmen eagerly “working toward the fuhrer”.

Trump has shown an aggressive tendency to defy rules and violate norms, and the more he is criticized for doing so (but suffers no consequences) the more aggressive his violations become and the more devout his following becomes. It is a minority now but as he evades censure and removal it may grow. Impunity is very attractive, especially to the powerless, and Americans feel very powerless in this economy. Trump’s “joke” about shooting someone on 5th Ave was a trial balloon, a test. It was foreshadowing. Hitler wrote Mein Kampf; Trump tweets and blurts his intentions. When he is thwarted he says he was joking. As soon as he can, though, he violates the norm again and increases his license to violate further norms. Trump’s comical barroom blowhard persona has already begun to evolve into a mask of hate.